Did you know that the average person watches one month per year of TV (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics) and spends an average of 55 minutes a day on social media?

Frankly I’m over it, all of it, and as part of my life and time restructure, I’m trying to make a determined effort to distance myself from as much of the drivel as possible.

Futurist Mark Pesce – Screen Grab Courtesy of ABC Radio (Australia)

It’s a harder habit to break than you might think though. All of these mediums, be it TV, newspaper, or social media, condition us to think or act a certain way.

Don’t believe me?

Have a listen to this podcast <link> by presenter Richard Fidler from ABC (Australia). His show is called Conversations <link> and he interviewed futurist Mark Pesce about the effects social media, specifically Facebook, has on people.

Mark believes Facebook is constantly trying to shape our emotional state and that the world is increasingly being presented to us as we want to see it, rather than as it really is.

Photo Courtesy: laughingsquid.com

So what am I doing about it?

Well, I don’t read newspapers any more, and I don’t watch the TV news as much, maybe 10 minutes in the morning to get the traffic report is about it.

Photo Courtesy : hiveminer.com

The evenings are spent watching Hogan’s Heroes<link>, Happy Days <link> or Countdown Classics <link> before the mind numbing reality shows start. After that I read a motorcycle magazine or a good book.

On the social media front, I’ve already culled two accounts related to this blog (The Experimental Ghost). These were not performing and had few, if any, followers. So if you followed me on Pinterest or Flickr sorry they’re gone and will not be updated again.

Facebook will follow in the next few weeks. The page has been up since November 2012 and has 48 followers. Sure, readers do get linked to this blog but not enough to warrant an upkeep.

Likewise, Instagram will go as well, there are too few followers to warrant spending time on there. Besides blog links don’t get posted to that medium anyway, it’s mainly happy snaps.

By far Google+, WordPress, andTwitter at a close 3rd provide the most links to this blog, so these have been given a reprieve for the moment.

YouTube will remain, as it hosts some of the video posted on this blog from time to time.

I guess this causes a bit of a conundrum for those of you who follow my blog and are notified via one of the social media platforms mentioned above.

What to do?

Well, WordPress has a follow button down to the bottom right of this post and there is an email subscription mechanism to the top right… see where it says “Gis A Follow”?

I’d encourage you to use either of those two options in the first instance.

Failing that you can follow me on Google+. That page will not be deleted as it hosts some of the photos from blog posts and is linked to YouTube as well.

I agree that we are conditioned in what we are seeing in the media or allowed to see. In the US we have CNN or as I like to call it the Censored News Network. Everything we see in this country is so biased I follow a few different foreign news sites on Facebook.
We canceled our cable many moons ago and just have basic which comes with our internet service Sometimes in the evenings for background noise hubby will watch MASH, Andy Griffith, or Hogan’s Heroes that come on one of the oldie stations we get.
Back when scripted wasn’t “reality”.
Hopefully you won’t lose any followers with your changes. I’ve never done anything but my Trobairitz blog and a personal fb page so I am not a Pinterst, Instagram, Twitter, etc user.

I’m hearing you mate. I’m over waste book, you do nothing but scroll endlessly down through adds and memes, hardly anyone posts anything.
I just concentrate on my blog and my youtube page which is only there to serve my blog.

I don’t watch much tv anymore at all actually as most of the time I’m on the PC looking out for motorcycle blogs, vlogs and content. I don’t like anything on tv anymore.

Good post Ghost, and I agree wholeheartedly. We ditched cable TV years ago; what little boob-tube we watch is on Netflix, where we have total control on what to watch. I myself never got into the social media scene from the get-go. Don’t even have a “dumb” phone. Wife calls me a luddite. My world news comes from the BBC site every couple of weeks. Not perfect, but far superior to American “news” media. Anyway, my life is much simpler and less stressful. Good luck in trimming down the garbage!

Glad to read this! I like to call it ‘poison’ – a lot of the time it’s entertaining but definitely feels like brain rot. Especially the shows like Married At First Sight… really?! I thought I was just a cynical c*nt, but I guess I’m not the only one with the same thoughts. Good post!

Yup, getting pretty much the same vibe down South my man. I like Google+ for pics and YouTube, Twitter for gags and more pics and Insta for sharing happy snaps otherwise the rest are pretty much dead to me too. I hardly have time to write blogs these days while I’m studying again.

I got the free Netflix thingy for a trial and its ok but yeh TV is a brain freeze, can’t stand those shows but somehow sometimes they just hook you in!